Browsing the App Store isn’t easy, but we try to make it easier with our weekly picks of the best new indie iOS games. This week we’ve got flying saucers, pirates, and Death on a 16-bit horse skeleton. Here’s this week’s Under The Radar.

This 3D space shooter has a clever title, and it’s also fast, fun, and easy to pick up and play. By tilting your device, you’ll control your flying saucer and take aim at the rockets blasting towards you. Awesome Saucer isn’t as complex as Gameloft’s Star Battalion, and it lacks online high scores, but it’s still a good choice for any casual space pilot.

If you enjoyed Sword & Poker, we highly recommend you download the free Dice Soccer as well. Like Sword & Poker, Dice Soccer combines two unlikely genres into a deep and addictive experience. Your soccer players become dice when they’re on the field, and whichever team rolls a higher score gets possession of the ball. You can also hire better players with your winnings, and unlock more players with Game Center achievements.

While at first Hungribles may appear to be another Angry Birds clone, it’s much more challenging than that. Your goal is to shoot food at small, cat-like creatures called Hungribles. Once you’ve fed a Hungrible, it becomes fat, creating a gravitational force around it and warping your shots. We recommend this one for players who enjoyed Cut the Rope for its tricky puzzles and cute main character.

If you’ve played a tile-rotating puzzle game like PipeRush or Pipe Mania before, you know what to expect with PirateGunner. Instead of sewage lines, in PirateGunner you’re connecting fuses to cannons by rotating the mess of rope in the middle of the screen. As you make connections, you’ll be able to watch a pirate ship battle unfold at the top. Due to its high-seas setting, PirateGunner seems to have a lot more action than a typical puzzle game.

The App Store’s seen plenty of Canabalt-style high score games, but how many successfully combine Robot Unicorn Attack with Ingmar Bergman’s classic film The Seventh Seal? In that movie, a knight challenges death to a game of chess, but here, death rides an undead steed and smashes everything in his way. The haunting atmosphere and 16-bit graphics are great, so check it out for a stylish survival game.

So many games come out for iOS on a regular basis that it can be difficult to keep track of them all, let alone review them. In this edition of Under the Radar, I highlight a handful of games from this summer that I enjoyed immensely. Whether it’s because of ingenuity in gameplay, or a great mix of old-school and new, these are games, in no particular order, that captured my attention over the last few months. (more…)

We regularly cover the big new iOS games, but there’s even more to the App Store. Every day, dozens of indie iOS games come out of the woodwork. Here are our picks for the best new games from small studios, which you might not have heard of yet.

It can be hard to find quality indie games on the App Store– not because there aren’t enough, but because there are too many. Instead of taking a chance based on a game’s App Store icon, description, and user reviews, try some of our suggestions this week for an alternative gaming experience. Even better– three of this week’s picks are free to download!

Big-name games tend to perform well in the App Store, because gamers often gravitate towards known commodities like After Burner Climax or Gun Bros 2. While we love to review popular brands, we’re also looking for the next big thing from the indie iOS development community. Here are our picks for the new indie iOS games that we think really shine.

The original Mos Speedrun was one of those nearly perfect games that absolutely nailed exactly what it was going for: creating a super tight platformer that was designed for speedruns. The sequel is coming soon, and this new trailer shows what to expect.